Bill Siddig: Good morning everyone. Welcome to today's program, "Honey Bees, Satellites, and Climate Change", featuring Dr. Wayne Esaias. I'm Bill Siddig [ spelled phonetically ] , chief of the Science, Technology, and Business Division here at the Library. And this event is one in our series in which we learn from important writers, thinkers, and practitioners in the various fields of science, technology, business, and economics. This lecture is the second in a series of four programs about cutting edge research presented by leading scientists through a partnership between the Library's Science, Technology, and Business Division and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. We are delighted to be collaborating with NASA to bring to the public, through these lectures, the exciting recent findings based on NASA's observations of Earth from space, and to showcase the Library of Congress's rich collections of books and other scholarly resources which document and preserve the record of science. The remaining programs in this series will be: "City Lights, Spy Satellites, and Urban Spraw"l, on June 27th in Dining Room A on the sixth floor of this building; and on October 17th, also in Dining Room A, "Observing, Fighting, and Mitigating Damage from Fires". I hope you will be able to attend both of these programs. I would also like to bring to your attention the next program sponsored by my division. On April 18th, Dr. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, and author and critic of the food industry, will speak on two of her latest books, Safe Food and What to Eat. I hope you'll be able to join us for this interesting talk. And before introducing today's speaker, I would like to thank Alison Kelly and Peg Clifton [ spelled phonetically ] of our Science Reference staff for all their good work in preparing for today's program. Alison prepared a research guide on bees, beekeeping, and crop pollination, and Peg wrote a guide on global warming and climate change. Both of these publications are available on the table right outside the theater, on a table, which you are free to take with you. And they also prepared a display of books marked "Collections on bees and climate change" for you to look at. I would also like to thank Jeannie Allen, Senior Science Education Specialist at Goddard, as the principal coordinator of this project with the Library. Jeannie and the NASA staff have also provided handouts for you to take, take with you. It is now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Wayne Esaias, who has been a biological oceanographer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland since 1984. Wayne received his Bachelor's Degree in the Biological Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University and his Masters and PhD from Oregon State University, in Biological Oceanography. He has held positions at NASA's Langley Research Center, the Marine Sciences Research Center at SUNY-Stony Brook, and the Johns Hopkins University. He has led several missions related to the role of marine productivity in the global carbon cycle using visible satellite sensors. And he has recently been involved with assessing the requirements and performance of the follow-up instruments due to fly on the national polar orbiting environmental satellite series. Wayne is also a master beekeeper, as honored by the Eastern Apiculture Society. And he is an active member of the Maryland State Beekeepers Association. As a beekeeper, Wayne has lately begun combining his interest in bees with his professional expertise in global climate change. He is interested in bringing the power of global satellite observations and models to bear on the important but difficult question of how climate change will impact bees and pollination. And now, to learn about the results of his studies and observations, it is my honor to welcome Dr. Wayne Esaias. [ applause ] Dr. Wayne Esaias: Well, thank you very much Bill, for that nice introduction, and I'd like to thank you all for coming in to hear a talk on a beautiful day like this. Wow. What a day to have a talk on bees, with the cherry blossoms blooming and the nectar flow just about ready to start. So I appreciate your being here and I hope you get out and walk around. As was said, my training, my credentials are really in biological oceanography, and I work with ocean color and phytoplankton and how green the ocean is, and how much CO2 is going in and coming out. And as part of those duties at Goddard, I worked with colleagues on the terrestrial side of the house, worrying about vegetation and whatnot. So I have a pretty good knowledge of that. But as you know, this is kind of a marriage between a career and my backyard activities. And what do they say about -- you know, spouses and lovers, may they never meet. I'm not sure how this is going to turn out. [ laughter ] You'll be interested in how I got started in beekeeping. I live in Howard County and when my son was about 12 or 13, in 4H and in Boy Scouts, one Thursday night the assistant scoutmaster came in -- this was right when the Berlin Wall went down and defense contractors were downsizing. Female Speaker: I think there's a little trouble with the audio. Wayne Esaias: Should I come over here? Okay? That's much better. Okay. He announced on a Thursday evening that he was moving back to Cedar Rapids, Iowa and everybody was shocked because all the kids loved him. He said, "I do have one problem. I have three hives of bees. I need somebody to take them." And my son said, "We'll do it, won't we Dad?" [ laughter ] He said, "That'll be awesome." So, I was -- I'm allergic to yellowjackets. [ laughter ] And I wanted to try beekeeping, so I thought, "Well we'll give it a chance." And this was in the dead of winter, just after the mites got here, and they were in sad shape. So we had to go on a crash-learning course and attended classes. But it turned out to be a really nice family activity. My wife's involved and my daughter took over the hives when Colin went to school. And she's a beekeeper in her own right. There'll be some other interesting stories. Let's see -- whoops, that went asleep. What we want to talk about is the plight of the pollinators and the honeybees, and impact of climate change, global warming. We know it's going to have an impact. And why it's important is shown right here. This worker honeybee, a female, is on a flower. They formed a partnership about 120 million years ago. Flowers began evolving and pollinators evolved with them. She has pollen on her back leg in a pollen basket. She's covered all over with pollen; she's very fuzzy. And this plant is receiving the benefit of her action of taking pollen from one plant to the other and spreading it around. It's a key phenomenon now of our terrestrial ecosystems. About three quarters of the flowering plants are dependent upon pollinators to help them procreate. You don't get fruit unless the flowers get pollinators. Most of our terrestrial ecosystems are built around this interaction, the plant/pollinator interaction. And if you are to understand the impact of climate change on ecosystems, you must understand how this interaction is going to be affected. Let's go, here we go. The honeybee is also the workhorse of the commercial pollination industry and our agriculture. The value is $14 to $20 billion in the US alone. This is an apple orchard in Yakima Valley, Washington. Here the bees are being loaded on a truck, in order to pollinate this large extent of crops; there are not enough native pollinators in the hedgerows, et cetera. The trees are all going to bloom, begin blooming on the same day, like you see down at tidal basin. The only way that an orchard grower can provide pollinators is to have bees come in, and put one colony every quarter acre or so. Our agriculture depends on it. About every third bite that you eat -- like, what did you have for breakfast? Anybody have a cup of coffee? A cup of coffee? Did you have any yogurt with fruit in it, maybe blueberries? There you go. Strawberries? Melons, yep. All of that, even for breakfast. A lot of our food depends on pollinators. This is from the New York Times. Almonds co-evolved with the honeybee. That's the only thing that pollinates them. That's a big industry. And California annually imports millions of colonies, hives of honeybees across the state line on those trucks just to pollinate almonds. At five dollars a pound and tons per acre, it makes a profit margin. Our pollinators -- if you've been reading the news at all you know our pollinators are under stress. There are pesticides. This is a sprayer used to spray orchards. This guy is crop dusting. He's doing it right, it's at night. All the bees are inside the colonies and so they're less affected. In addition, there are invasive species to the United States. The Verroa mite came in about 1987 and has spread across the country. And when I first learned how to keep bees, they were already here. I don't know the good old days. But this organism is still killing colonies; perhaps 20 or 30 percent every winter die because of the Verroa mite infestation. It grows on the pupa and also the adult bee. And the bees have a hard cuticle. It's like a giant tick the size of a dinner plate if we were the size of a bee. They make a hole in them and it just weeps and they get infected. There's a small hive beetle that came over from Africa about ten years ago, spread up and down the East Coast. It's warm. And it devastates honey. The most recent thing to hit the beekeeping industry and our pollinators is called "colony collapse disorder", very high losses from especially migratory beekeepers. You know, 8,000 out of 10,000 colonies are dead in some beekeepers' yards. They are found virtually devoid of adult bees. It's like the bees forget to come back. The honey is there, the pollen is there, the brood is there, but there are no bees. So they're having a devil of a time trying to figure out what's causing this. It's under investigation. There's a large activity centered at Penn State University at Marik [ spelled phonetically ] . I'll refer you to that. Hopefully, the Department of Agriculture and our bee scientists will figure out what's going on soon. Otherwise, we will pay for it in the food store. The question is, how will climate affect pollinators? This is -- this butterfly is a good pollinator and it's there to remind me that the honeybee is not the major pollinator in the country. We have oodles of solitary bees, bats, birds, butterflies, beetles that help. They form unique relationships with the plants. And many of the solitary bees come out when things are blooming, apple orchards, say. They collect pollen. They pack pollen in little tubes or holes in trees, lay an egg, cover it over, pack more pollen, lay another egg, and after they've done this maybe a dozen times the adults die. Well the trees are still blooming. And you don't see them for the rest of the year. The pupa overwinters, and like magic next spring they emerge as adults and begin their pollination job. If they have a different temperature cue than the trees, they might come out at the wrong time, or the trees bloom at the wrong time. And that matchup is what drives ecologists up the wall. What's going to happen? It's kind of unpredictable. There's a lot of recognition of this. There was a National Academy of Science study on the status of the pollinators in the United States released last fall. The US Postal Service, with help of the North American Pollinators Protection Campaign, has seen to generate a stamp that will be released June 24th, during National Pollinator Week, to bring people's attention to what's going on, or what might go on. By the way, these are nice bumblebees. They are excellent pollinators. They have longer tongues. They can pollinate things that honeybees can't. So let's talk quickly about honeybees and what makes them unique. This is kind of fun. This picture by, Gould and Gould, is taken from inside a hive as a worker bee, she is landing -- she's coming back with about one third of her body weight full of nectar. Bringing it back to feed the colony. They go for miles around collecting nectar and pollen and water and propolis that they used to stick their hive together. This is what makes the world go round. Bees are herbivores, unlike the wasps that give me a reaction. Those wasps can sting lots of times. They sting other insects to eat them for food. They are carnivores. Honeybees and other bees are herbivores. They eat nothing but nectar and pollen. Nectar is sugar. They use it to make honey, and that's their energy resource for flying -- takes lots of energy -- and keeping warm in winter. That's very important for honeybees. We'll talk about that. Pollen is turned into bees inside the hive. It's 30 to 80 percent protein adapted by the plants to suit the honeybee nutritional needs very well. The bees eat it, make royal jelly, and turn it into bees. They have to collect lots of pollen. That's why they're such good pollinators. The plants offer nectar as a bribe to get the pollinators to visit them. A flower is the equivalent of a neon sign in the plant kingdom, advertising pollen and nectar. "Here it is. Come get it." Let's talk about -- all worker bees are all female bees. They're not completely developed. Right now that one can't sting. She just came out. Very hairy. Better to collect pollen with. This is a male bee. His sole job is to make sure that the young females are fertilized so that they can lay worker eggs. They mate. He has big eyes so he can spot young queens flying outside the hive at about 60 feet up. Then the queens mate, the drone dies. He comes in -- or she comes in, comes back to the hive, and usually never leaves. My 13-year-old son found out that drones don't have stingers. You can go out and pick them up and play with them. And so he'd invite his friends over and say, "My bees are so gentle they don't even sting. Look, go ahead, pick one up." Well we had some talks about that. [ laughter ] Because they didn't know the difference. He wouldn't tell them until afterward the difference between a drone and a worker bee. And most of them are workers. The queen over here is the mother of all the bees in the colony, and there might be 60,000 bees. She has a very long abdomen. She lays eggs. The blue dot was put there by a beekeeper to track her age and to make her easier to spot. We use five colors, the queen colors, one different color each year. This -- if this was a recent photograph, Here she is in a hive. She's laying an egg. She has her abdomen down, there she is putting an egg right on the bottom. The worker bees are gathered around her licking her pheromones off. That's the chemical that binds the hive together. And now she's going to lay another egg. That's what she does. An egg a minute. She's an egg factory. She can lay 2,000 eggs a day. She puts an egg right on the bottom. Now she's filled up these cells. After three days it hatches into larvae. Here's a larvae. It's about a six day old larvae. The white milky substance is a little bit of royal jelly. All the bees get a little bit of royal jelly. The queens get a lot of royal jelly. And it does all of its growth -- because it's fed very rich food made from pollen; it gets fed about every 15 minutes -- does all its growth in six days and then they cap it over with beeswax. And it undergoes metamorphosis just like a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. This bee is starting to get pigmentation in its eyes. That tells me that it's 15 days old. It has six more days to go. And then it chews its way out and gets right to work. Right now it can't fly. Flight muscles are not developed. It can't sting. You can pick these bees up if you can recognize them. And so all it can do is tend house. It goes through a series of jobs as it gets older. Here's the age. Tending house, attending debris, carrying out the dead. When it's about three weeks old, it learns how to fly. It practices and orients and then it's a field bee. It can go out and gather nectar and pollen and it's a field bee until it dies about three weeks later. It only lives six weeks. If the Queen is laying an egg a minute, there's a worker bee dying once a minute. She has to keep laying eggs. They have to keep bringing lots of pollen and to turn those eggs into bees. And that's why they're such a valuable commodity for agriculture. It's a turning-pollen-in-to-bee factory. We'll go through this kind of quickly. Here at Beltsville, about three weeks ago here's a patch of crocuses. There are bees working it. This bee is diving down in amongst the anthers, really doing a good job of spreading that pollen around. She'll go back to her hive, you'll see her come in, there she is, with pollen on her legs. They crawl down the tube. They get inside. They do their famous bee dances to let their sisters know where to go to get the pollen. David Adams filmed this sequence in reverse. He first looked at the bee dances, figured out where they were going, walked outside a while and there were the crocuses. I'll leave this for your reading. Karl von Frisch got a Nobel Prize in 1967 for convincing his colleagues that bees actually communicate. They have a dance language. If you know that language, you can look at individual bees in the observation hive and plot where they go. The hive here is in the middle. North is up. And the distance here, which is what you need to take away with you, is four kilometers. That's about 2 1/2 miles. Bees forage over very large areas, collecting whatever is there, the easiest thing, and bring it back to the colony. What we know now is that they forage over a large area for pollen and nectar. Their colony life depends upon it. That's about 2500 acres. They are highly adapted to foraging and bringing that nectar back. That's what makes them good for agriculture and ecosystems. And therefore, they're very good at telling us when things are blooming. When things are blooming. That's what we want to try to measure. That area that they forage over is perfectly sized for working with our ecosystem models, and satellite data. It's a perfect match. Now, let's talk about the annual colony cycle. One of the benefits that I had when Colin and I picked up the hives, the guy had a scale. He said, "Yeah, it's an old scale. You might as well take that too. It's fun." This is a platform scale. Feed store scale. And the technique is just to put a hive on it and go out every night if you're a crazy scientist like me when all the bees come home and weigh it. And you can track how well the colony is doing. Let me walk you through this. The blue line is the weight of the hive in pounds. At this time of year, first part of April, it's losing weight as the bees eat the honey that they've stored from last year to keep the hive warm. All of that egg laying that I showed you takes place at 93, even on those cold February nights. The Queen and that patch of brood is maintained at 93 by the bees tensing their flight muscles and eating lots of honey. So it loses weight until maybe around the first part of May. All of a sudden it starts gaining weight. It gains weight at a tremendous rate here in Maryland. This is DC, I'm sorry, in this region. And finally it levels off. There's no more nectar out there, and the mean beekeeper comes along and takes all the honey leaving enough for them to eat. In this region during the summer, there's not a lot of nectar out there. They can't make honey. There's a little bit in fall when the goldenrods and asters bloom. One point I want to make. This dotted line is the estimate of how many thousands of bees there are. And I want you just to think about this time of year when cherries are blooming and apples are getting ready to bloom. There are not many bees in the hive. It hasn't grown up yet. It's still growing up in spring. That's caused beekeepers to move their colonies down to Florida and Louisiana where's warmer and the bees can grow faster, and then you have nice strong colonies to bring back for pollination. That's the reason for migratory beekeeping. Now, let's look at that in detail, because the bees can tell us to the day when things start blooming in this big area. Here is -- the green line is the pounds gained per day. And you notice it goes up to eight pounds per day. That's a lot. Around the first of May it gained two pounds. Two pounds of honey in one day. It goes up to maybe pounds in a good year. There are rainy days when the bees can't go out and it loses weight. It peaks. This is a rainy day. Drops down. Now these days are beautiful, clear, wind free, wind-less days. It lost a pound and a half. And that is because the nectar flow is over. The flowers are not producing any more nectar. They stopped blooming. So, this hive, this technique can tell us to the day when the nectar flow is over, when they plant/pollinator interaction ceases. It can tell us to the day when it starts I'm a field biologist at heart. And I sit at NASA behind a computer all day. So what could I do but, we plotted this up. Plotted this up -- the whole time series. I did this for 14 years. And what you see here, this is the nectar flow from 1992. It peaks here. The -- and there's '93, '94 and you go up, I missed a few years. There are El Nios. The average is 13th of May where I live. And there's good news and bad news here. There's lots of variability. It's all over the place. Varies by a month from year to year. We have good years and bad years. Take it on faith, all that variability is related to short-term climate events, like El Nios and La Nias. On wet years when we have wet Junes, clover, Dutch clover blooms and they can gather nectar. Doesn't happen all the time. On warm winters, they can gather lots of nectar and pollen from dandelions and field cresses and mustards and things like that. But the main peak here is from trees. The bad news is that there's a long-term trend, and this is what shocked me. The variability is good. The bees and plants co-evolved. They've lived with short-term climate variations. They can survive that. They might have a good year and a bad year. But long-term trends might put them outside of their realm of experience, and that's what we're worried about. There is a long-term trend. It's getting earlier and earlier. Now, to put that in perspective, I have to show you where I live, which is here in Highland in Howard County. And I went into the literature to find out if there's anybody else made scale hive measurements like this. And where do my measurements -- because it's one spot, in Howard County. And I found some way back in 1922 and 23 when the agricultural research station was located in Somerset. You know it as downtown Chevy Chase. It used to be a dairy farm. [ laughter ] And James Hambleton [ spelled phonetically ] made scale hive measurements there and he published them and it's in the Library and it's in the record. And I could go back and look at it. They made measurements at the University of Maryland in the late '50s, '60s. In order to make the comparison, it gets a little bit complicated. There's a tremendous gradient in climate going from the coastal plain up to the piedmont. I'm in the piedmont at about 480 feet of altitude, and these sites are about 150. And that makes a difference when plants bloom. So we figured out a fudge factor, and now what I show you are the early measurements at Chevy Chase, College Park, and my measurements, all on the same scale we think. And now you can see how dramatic this decline is, has been. So you go into the literature and say, "What other information can I find to support this?" And I have to tell you about our plant partners now. I said trees. The peaks of my nectar flow and around here come from black locust trees, robinia trees -- makes a very nice light aromatic honey. When it blooms it turns the skyline white, fills the air with perfume. There's a bee in there. This is in my backyard. There are my colonies right there. And in fact that one is the scale. The other plant partner is tulip poplar tree. Tulip poplar makes a very nice, unique, dark honey. I have customers that, "Did you get any tulip poplar this year?" So they like it. You can only get in this part of the country. Tulip poplar trees used to be the dominant tree around here. We've lost a lot of it to development. It's rarely replanted. It's a key species of the mesic, the humid eastern forest. Goes up and down the coast. When the nectar is flowing from the flower, you can go out right in my apiary with thousands of bees and pull down a blossom and the nectar runs down your arm. It is a big event to the ecosystem. There are bugs and flies and wasps and butterflies and ants, everybody's getting this free sugar, free energy. It is a hopping time of year. Lasts two weeks and then it's over. So, when do trees bloom? The folks at the Smithsonian -- is anyone here from the Smithsonian? Another question. Are there any other beekeepers in the audience? Fantastic. Great. Okay. Folks at the Smithsonian -- Stan Shetler and folks started recording the first blooming dates for lots of trees and plants in DC. First person to see a tulip poplar bloom calls in. About 100 different plants. They started in 1970. I adjusted them for the altitude change, and plotted here are black locust trees and tulip poplar trees. They bloom just about on top of each other. And now you can begin to see there's a decline. They noticed it. Then it kind of levels off maybe in DC, but it looks like my decline is later, out where I live. And in fact I put these trendlines on just to let you see what I see when I looked at it. Looks like it's level and then all of a sudden, wham, it starts going down. And that means earlier blooming dates. The distance between there and there is a full month. That's a lot. It looks like near Highland in Howard County, it started 15 years later. Why is that? We can come up with a good explanation, and it is urbanization and the heat island effect. What you're looking at here is the eastern seaboard, the western shore and if it's red that means it's urbanized. And you can look in 1792, no cities. 1850, big jump in time here. 1900, 1925, that's when those first measurements were made by Dr. Hambleton of the USDA about right there. Not too impacted. There were dairy farms in Chevy Chase. '53, in this time period is when the University of Maryland measurements were made. Now in '72, growth really started. And these are only ten-year steps and you can see how tremendous the development, how tremendous increase in rate of development has taken place. If it's red, there are cars burning gasoline, adding heat. There are houses adding heat. Asphalt roads, roofs, people generating heat. That raises the winter temperature. It's a well-known fact in meteorology: we have fewer freezing rain dates in DC now than we did 30 years ago. So now I take two separate little towns, Beltsville, where -- which is where the agricultural research station is now, close to College Park -- and Clarksville, and I'm going to plot the average of the minimum temperature each day for February, March, April, May. In Fahrenheit it goes up as a function of years since 1960, and the green dots are Greenbelt. And you see Greenbelt is warmer than Clarksville near where I live. Both of them are increasing. There's about three-degree difference between the two. But look, in 1970 Beltsville was at 36 average. It took Clarksville 15 years to reach that temperature in the winter. That's exactly the same delay I see in the blooming dates from the Smithsonian data to when my nectar flow started getting early. It's just urbanization, urban sprawl spreading out raising the temperature. What's significant about that, and this is what has me really excited, is we now have some real numbers on the effect of warming of the climate on blooming dates of tulip poplar trees and black locust trees. It turns out one degree of warming is a one-week advance in the honeybee nectar flow for tulip poplar and black locust in central Maryland. Here is the peak; I plotted the peak of the nectar flow as a function of temperature. If it goes down like this, it's warmer and it's earlier. Now ecologists have a real number that they can plug into climate ecosystem models. What is going to be the effect of warming on plant blooming? The real global warming, CO2, when it comes, will be four What's the impact of earlier nectar flows in Maryland? Well, it will change the way we keep bees. Right now it's too late for us to start new colonies to enjoy the nectar flow. I told you that we have trouble getting our colonies strong enough to serve good pollination. That might likely get harder. Crops may suffer, costs increase. There'll have to be more migratory pollination to provide those pollinators. Think about the wildlife. If it's poor pollination of all these flowering plants, there's going to be less nuts, apples, pears, berries for them to eat. Migratory insects like those butterflies that migrate up the east coast? Well, and they'd better plan on getting here a month earlier than they did before. Otherwise, the gas tank's going to be empty. Will they adapt? I don't know. I don't know whether this is a big problem or not. I really don't. But now we have a way to maybe try to measure when the nectar flows occur. We also have the Africanized bee to worry about. How far north will it migrate? Now, to make things even more complicated, not all plants will bloom earlier the warmer it gets. Some very important nectar plants will bloom later or at the same time. Sweet clover, no trend in the Smithsonian data. Sweet clover -- when you go to the grocery store and buy sweet clover honey, it's from this plant. Probably comes from the Dakotas, Nebraska, Midwest, Canada -- acres and acres, long days during the summer up there. They can forage 18 hours. Silver maple. It's an important pollen plant for the bees. It blooms later in DC than it did before. So it's shifting the other way. Each plant will have its own temperature response. There are lots of plants out there, lots of pollinators. Question is, we now know that Dr. Abram's dates for Maryland -- he gave a whole series of dates -- are obsolete, at least where I live. What about the rest of the country? How do we handle this? Well, I do work for NASA, okay? This is where I earn my money. NASA has a fleet of satellites that are really super for measuring the Earth and vegetation and climate change. As you well know, the Earth rotates. These sensors measure vegetation twice a day. Terra is a good one right there, okay? SeaWIFs. We can observe the biosphere and how it's changing. This is an instrument that I worked on, was involved with. It measures the ocean as well as the land. The shifts in green here are when spring comes and then fall comes, and the green moves north. We get these data at about one kilometer resolution and we grid it up to five kilometers. That's exactly the same area that bees sample, okay? For North America, the modus instrument produces a vegetation index. And here you are looking at I think about eight years, six years of modus data showing greening each summer. This covers your backyard. It covers my backyard at, one-kilometer resolution. From data like this, we can now compute how fast the plants are growing, how much photosynthesis is taking place. This approach is invaluable for tracking carbon in the atmosphere and how the biosphere interacts with it. It's great for doing crop forecasts. Department of Agriculture uses it for this, as well as Landsat data, to make crop forecasts. It works really well. Crops like fields of wheat and soybeans and corn. The green is what you harvest. It doesn't work so well with what we want to do. It doesn't see plants flowering. In fact, when you go on Google Earth or Google Maps or MapQuest and you can get a satellite image, it's high resolution. You can see individual trees. The data that we're talking about is much broader resolution. One kilometer. You get a mishmash. The high-resolution imagery is only available, say, once a month. The satellites come over less frequently. There's a ton of data. The only way we can handle the frequent observations is at this higher resolution. This is a site in Caroll County. There's a scale hive right there, and it integrates over this entire area. So the question is, how can we link this wonderful satellite data and climate data to address plant blooming and pollinator interaction? Well, you already know the answer. It's through a series of scale hives, because that measures it. That measures the interaction. So you go in the literature and well, where's the scale hive network? It doesn't exist yet, folks. But we're working on it. There are a handful of measurements around the country, and most of them are before the times of satellites, some of them 30-year data sets. All we have left are monthly averages. The real data has been thrown away, lost. Some data exist here, here -- Manitoba, Canada is doing a great job. But there hasn't been a lot of communication between beekeepers and [ unintelligible ] when plants bloom, and climatologists, to take advantage of this. This paper was written, showed weekly data, shows three El Nios in that time period. And the word El Nio was not used once. It was published in 1993. There's just no connection. We need to make the connection. So, what we're doing now is a volunteer network of beekeepers. There are lots of beekeepers. You saw four in the audience. The average density of hives in North America is And so what we're asking beekeepers to do, to consider, is buy a scale. "Put your hive on it. Record the data." And what we're doing at Goddard is we're providing an Internet link in order to preserve those records, expand the number of locations, and we will do at Goddard -- provide the link between the scale hive data and the satellite data, and look at these changes. We have a very nice Web page up and running. You can go to it. It's called HoneyBeeNet. There will be site data and satellite data and how to join and that sort of thing. It's still being improved day by day. Just talking informally to the Maryland State Beekeepers and the Howard County Club, people started going out and buying scales on their own. We now have 30 people around the state of Maryland. This will be the best survey ever of when nectar flows occur in Maryland, when the pollinators' plants are interacting. We put a scale now in downtown Chevy Chase in a couple's backyard. They volunteered. That's about a quarter of a mile from where Dr. Hambleton collected his data in 1922. We're going to make a direct comparison. There's a student monitoring a hive at the University of Maryland. There's one at Beltsville. The rest are volunteer beekeepers. The response from the beekeepers and concern to understand how global warming is going to impact their nectar flows and their bees in their backyard is just overwhelming. We haven't advertised this nationally. Maybe that will happen today. Here's Gordon Wetherby's scale hive. He will post his data on our HoneyBeeNet. We'll provide the satellite data for him to look at and other scientists to look at. This is some modus-enhanced vegetation. The higher the line, the greener it is. And you're looking at one, two, three, four, five, six, seven years, starting in 2000, and it gets green in the summer, brown in the winter. Sometimes we have snow. But look at the inter-annual variability in those shapes. That's caused by climate events, short-term climate affecting the growing season. And our job will be to match up the scale hive data and figure out what the relationship is, so that then, with a few clicks of a mouse, we can extrapolate this throughout the whole tulip poplar region, up to New York and down to South Carolina. That's the intent. The benefits of this will be tremendous. Like I said, I went into the literature. There's a lot of lore among beekeepers. You saw it Ulee's Gold. Remember that movie? Handed down from father to son, where to put your hives, when. Very little of it is written down and recorded and available for us to use for assessing the impact of climate change. And this will give us a baseline. We don't have a good baseline right now, except for my backyard, as to, what is it now? If you don't know what it is now, how are you going Okay. Citizen scientists' role in taking care of the stewardship of the environment. What's happening in my backyard? I was shocked. You know, I thought, "Global warming, sure" -- I mean I understand the data. It's real. I had no idea that my backyard was being affected already. We need these types of data and activities like this. We need support from the government to provide the infrastructure. We need to keep those satellites up there sending the data down. So, question for you is, what's happening in your backyard? Do you know? If you live in this area, you are already being impacted by climate change. I would encourage you to record the dates of when you see things bloom. There's a nice national phenology net on the Web. There is a Project Budburst, this year, started April 1st. It's not too late to join. Here are the URLs. It's also in the handout. And they will take your data and match it up with your latitude and longitude and record it so that the ecologists can begin to make these assessments. In your backyard you can provide forage for solitary bees, for bumblebees, et cetera, nesting sites for some of these solitary bees. Looks like a handful of soda straws. They like that. They build their nests inside of it. And then they'll disappear. They won't sting you. Hardly ever sting you. You can keep bees. It's a tremendous green thing to do, if you have a backyard. It doesn't take a big backyard. If you're in a nature center, you can rent a hive from beekeepers. It's a multimillion-dollar industry. Beekeepers will be happy to rent a hive. Might cost $100 a month, I don't know. Weigh it, if you're in a nature center. Visit an observation hive, by all means; there's a very nice one down a street at the Museum of Natural History. Did I get the name right? I've seen it before. Be careful with pesticides. If you must use them at all, follow the label. The labels are usually pretty good. You'll minimize damage. Buy local honey. Support our beekeepers. Local honey is much better for you. It contains local pollen. Helps you with your allergies. And you're supporting a beekeeper. My kids found out very soon after they were keeping bees that they could make a lot more money from selling the honey than they would ever get from selling their sheep. And besides, they didn't have to go out and feed and water them every night and every morning. So, they enjoyed it. It was a nice 4H activity. My daughter got grand champion at the state fair several years, a letter from the -- who was the Governor then? I forget. [ laughter ] Readings. It's been said -- and this is a challenge to our Library of Congress colleagues. It's been said that there's been more books written on bees and beekeeping than any other animal. That's an old thing that's handed down in lots of beekeeping classes, and there are lots of books. There are quite a few out there and quite a few published in the last several years. I don't know whether it's true or not, but if it's not the most, it probably comes a close second or third. Maybe they could find out. Okay. I'm sorry. I -- was that it? I guess I'm done. [ applause ] [ end of transcript ]